Learning from Colleagues

By the time our TCFN working group convened in Virginia, in April 2007, we all had gained insight about the non-grantmaking roles that community foundations can serve. For my part, I had been looking at governance in a new way afforded by the human systems course in which I was enrolled at the time. What I presented to my TCFN colleagues was a quadrant view of an organization's governance experience. The quadrants define the areas of (a) attitude and intention; (b) culture and shared values; (c) skills and actions; and, (d) systems and structure. I populated the quadrants with aspects from my experience of the Community Foundation of the New River Valley. Each index card that I posted on the storyboard display, described some feature or aspect of my foundation's governance experience. In the photo, I am pointing to the quadrant that concerns culture and shared values.

I had not yet realized how the community foundation board, as a human system, might find insight, in reflecting on its own development experience, into the nature of lived democracy in communities of the 21st century. And, as peer NGOs respond to our foundation's governance practices, which has been growing in requests for advice and consultation, how a community foundation's governance might impact a network of peer organizations by example, that governance as leadership could have a meaning that has as much to do with what a foundation does (make grants, serve donors, convene community) as it does with how a foundation is. Could a foundation's being have as much impact on its community as its doing? Are they necessarily the same?

If we are to reclaim democracy for civil society, and I am suggesting here we must because it has been lost in large measure, the question still remains, "Governance for what?" Is our hope that we will make our foundations, our nonprofits, stronger and abler, wiser and more sustainable, for their own sake? Or are we working for some higher, broader purpose? And, if so, is there some global purpose calling?